Should Machine Learning Be A Separate Major Like Computer Science?

US universities, especially the big four (MIT, CMU, Stanford, University of California and Berkeley) are already ahead of the pack in machine learning research and artificial intelligence. Not just the US, Canadian universities, especially the University of Toronto and Montreal lead in the computational side of things. In India too, IIT Hyderabad's Department of Computer Science and Engineering offers an MTech in machine learning which prepares students for ML-oriented jobs as well as research areas. IIT-H's CSE department is active in research areas such as networking, distributed systems, algorithms, graph theory and also offers a three year research-oriented MTech programme which enables students to work on sponsored research projects along with the coursework. There is also a two year MTech course in Machine Learning and Computing offered by Mathematics department of Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST).